doesn’t just play a central role in Heston’s life, he sees it as a way of explaining all of human existence; food has shaped not just what we do and who we are, but also what we are.
‘We evolved because of eating and the things around eating … when we discovered fire we moved away from eating only raw starches, our lower digestion started to shrink, our neck and therefore our larynx lengthened, which allowed us over time to start to vocalise. And that ability to communicate meant we could start to spread ideas, build up our imaginations and from that everything became possible.’
Connecting food to human imagination is his signature dish. He’s brought more original ideas into the kitchen than anyone else. He first got major attention in the culinary world when his restaurant, The Fat Duck, put crab ice cream on the menu – a dish that now seems almost ordinary in the food fantasy world he’s since created of edible pubs, food you can listen to and chocolates that float in mid-air.
He says his interest in the world of food went from zero to one hundred in a lunchtime: as a teenager, his dad got a bonus from work and to celebrate he took the family to a Michelin three-starred restaurant in France. The combination of not just the food and the tastes but the sensory overload of the smell of lavender from the restaurant garden, the feel of linen on the table, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the sounds of crickets and clinking glasses: ‘It felt like I’d gone down this rabbit hole into wonderland and I found something that fascinated me and I knew right then I wanted to be a chef.’
His imagination and curiosity were kick-started by studying ice cream. He found a recipe from 1870 for Parmesan ice cream. ‘I thought, “That’s bizarre!” and then I started questioning why was it bizarre, who says ice cream has to be sweet? And once I started questioning that, I began questioning everything. I found that thread and just kept on pulling.’
It means that while your average chef is checking out other restaurants and menus for inspiration, Heston will be investigating the worlds of biology, chemistry, history and geography. He has teamed up with professors in macrobiotics, psychologists and molecular scientists. As an example of how deep he can go in these lines of enquiry, this year the Royal Society of Chemists is publishing a list of 175 of the most influential scientists and chemists on the planet, alive or dead. Einstein’s on it, so is Heston.
He leads me over to a coat of arms he created, now framed on the kitchen wall. He says it took him seven years to design, as he wanted to capture everything he stood for. There is a twig of lavender to reflect smell and the trip to that first restaurant, a pair of hands to reflect the craft of his work, a Tudor Rose for the historical element of his cooking, a magnifying glass for the importance of investigation and enquiry, and an apple to reflect Newton’s discovery and non-linear thinking. Most telling of all is his motto, just two words, inscribed in italic font, which explain his approach and his creativity and what he puts forward as his best piece of advice for life:
‘Question everything.’
And to me he expands:
‘The opposite of question everything is question nothing. And if you don’t question things, there’s no knowledge, no learning, no creativity, no freedom of choice, no imagination. So I always ask why. And why not. I ask question, question, question, question. And then I listen. And that’s how I discover something new.’
He then concludes by asking me a question. It’s the one I am most dreading: ‘Fancy another game of table tennis?’
‘QUESTION EVERYTHING … IF YOU DON’T QUESTION THINGS, THERE’S NO KNOWLEDGE, NO LEARNING, NO CREATIVITY, NO FREEDOM OF CHOICE, NO IMAGINATION.’
– Heston Blumenthal
THE TWO VOICES OF ANNIE LENNOX
ANNIE LENNOX HAS TWO VOICES. The first is the one that has sold over eighty million albums, winning her five Grammys, an Academy Award and more Brit Awards than any other female artist. Her second voice is the one she lends to women’s rights and the issue of HIV/AIDS in Africa. And it’s this campaigning voice that takes centre stage these days.
Annie remembers the moment when her singing voice changed pitch from artistry to activism. It was after taking part in a concert to launch 46664, Nelson Mandela’s HIV/AIDS foundation in South Africa, a country with the highest rate of HIV infection in the world. She witnessed Mandela describe the HIV pandemic as ‘a silent genocide, carrying the face of women’. He explained that one in three pregnant women were HIV positive in South Africa and AIDS was (and still is) a leading cause of death for women of reproductive age globally. Then, on a visit to a township hospital, she saw the impact of AIDS for herself, in clinics, rape crisis centres, orphanages and people’s homes. It was a dark epiphany for Annie. From then on, she shaped her life around responding to the tragedy.
The result has been over a decade of tireless work on tackling the issue – work that has, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, ‘contributed significantly to turning the pandemic around in our country’. In 2007 she founded a campaign called SING to raise global awareness and prompt action, helping to ensure that HIV positive women and children have access to the treatment and care they need. Annie has travelled across the globe giving fundraising performances, presentations, speeches and interviews on radio, television and in the printed press, at conferences, rallies and in government buildings, speaking truth to power at every given opportunity. She also became the founder of The Circle, an organisation which aims to inspire and connect women in order to harness their skills, creativity and influence, and to transform the challenges and injustices faced by the most disempowered girls and women in the world.
Those dusty plains of Sub-Saharan Africa are a long way from the working-class tenement block in Aberdeen where she was raised. Coming from a poor but musical family, she studied the piano and flute at school, which led her to be offered a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London at the age of seventeen. ‘It became my passport out of there.’
Tough years followed, however. ‘I had very little money and didn’t really know anyone. I lived in a variety of different bedsits, doing whatever I could to make ends meet, but even though my chances seemed bleak I didn’t want to go back to Scotland and feel as if I’d failed.’
One constant through it all was singing. ‘I would sing and sing and sing, walking down the street, in the shower, all the time, just by myself, and by the time three years at the Royal Academy had come to an end I knew I wanted to be a singer/songwriter, so I started to write songs on an old Victorian harmonium. I’d been writing poems since I was twelve and I had a lot to say.’
But for all the hard work, practice and passion, one factor for success was still missing: serendipity. That came thanks to Camden Market, where Annie sold second-hand clothes, sharing a stall with a friend. It was there that she got to know a guy selling records who told her, ‘You should meet my mate, Dave.’ According to Annie there was a creative connection with Dave Stewart from the beginning and within a few years they were dominating the charts on both sides of the Atlantic as Eurythmics.
Her life story is of a woman following her passions, wherever they may take her, from the tenements of Aberdeen to the townships of Africa, via the Grammys in America, and her advice fits that story perfectly.
‘There will be “Ah ha!” moments in life when a light might go on, when you think to yourself, “I MUST do that” – whatever it is. It’s not because someone says you should do it, but it’s because you feel absolutely compelled to
